After months of negotiating with the Morrissey administration, the Rockford Rescue Mission won approval Monday from aldermen to expand its program to accommodate more women and children in its recovery program.

The vote was 11-1 for the mission, which helps transform people’s lives from despair to independence. It takes no taxpayer money.

Here’s where it gets difficult for me. See, I really like and support the Rescue Mission. They do great work. But the alderman who cast the “no” vote has a viewpoint that deserves to be heard.

That vote came from Venita Hervey, D-5, who represents much of the central city. She spoke for several minutes in passionate opposition to the expansion, knowing that the agency had at least 10 votes.

I didn’t agree with her vote, but I know why she made it.

Hervey has long been frustrated by what’s happened to the west side over the decades, and the mission vote managed to focus all that frustration. Hervey believes that too many social services, public and private, have purposely located in the near west side and, as a result, the area attracts the downtrodden, the poor, the homeless from all over the region. She believes that many of these people are being directed here from Chicago to take advantage of our substantial safety net.

“Nobody talks about what happens when people leave the mission and go into abandoned houses. They come to the mission when they’re cold, need something to eat,” a still-fired-up Hervey told me today. “Then when they don’t want to follow the rules, and it’s warm, they still want to drink and do drugs. They lay in people’s yards or go to the encampment (of homeless people) under the Winnebago Street viaduct.

“No one cares about the impact on our children and neighborhoods. We are importing a lot of poverty into this city that we can’t sustain. Concord Commons is full of people from Chicago.”

Rockford has been loaded down with Section 8 housing from the Winnebago County Housing Authority. It has too many halfway houses for parolees, too many houses for sex offenders, said the civil rights attorney who worked in the 1990s for the plaintiffs in the People Who Care discrimination lawsuit against the Rockford School District.

Page 2 of 2 - Why, she asked me, can’t Roscoe and Rockton take on some of the burden? Haven’t people there lost jobs?

“Why should Rockford bear the regional burden? This is a huge burden on police, fire, hospitals. No one talks about the impact on Rockford taxpayers. They should relocate some of these social services into other areas.

“Rockford is becoming East St. Louis, a city of poor people where the people who have money and influence live outside. Teachers, police officers, firefighters don’t live here, and that sucking sound is the middle class moving out. Rockford is sliding into a place where we become a place of the poor, the indigent, where we must provide services.”

“I’m voting against any more Housing and Urban Development money that goes for these services.”

I agree with Hervey’s overall premise about the west side. I’ve written about it.

West Rockford in the 1960s was designated for decline by myopic and bigoted leaders who tried to saddle west Rockford with such disasters as a 1,000-unit public housing project across from Auburn High School, a garbage landfill at Centerville and Cunningham roads, a garbage incinerator on Montague Road. Organized residents stopped those things, which were designed to encourage middle-class residents to buy houses in the subdivisions being built on the east side.

We are living with the inevitable result of that deliberate “wink wink” policy of making the west side into the poverty zone. More recently, the loss of thousands of industry jobs has created a bumper crop of poor people. They are not from elsewhere. They are us.

Unlike Hervey, though, I think the Rescue Mission is part of the solution. Maybe they could open a branch in Roscoe?